Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Element #4 for Successfully Leading a Small Group: FOCUS

My assumption is that the members of a
healthy small group are sharing their lives outside of their normal meeting
times. A healthy small group should have "extra" events that bring
them together for purposes beyond studying the Bible. I call these events, the group FOCUS.

These events might be meals, parties, trips,
or better yet service projects, or missional activities. Taking a small amount
of time on a regular basis to focus on upcoming events will enable a group to
accomplish these kind of extra life-sharing events.

One group I was once part of loved to party.
Every summer we had several parties at homes, parks, and other places. Using
tools like email and Facebook enabled us to focus on these events even when we weren’t
meeting regularly

More importantly, our group also had several missional/service
focuses over the course of the year. Once every month we gathered to serve at a
local soup kitchen. Each Thanksgiving, we assembled a couple "meal
baskets" to give to other families. At Christmas, we adopted one or two
families and showered them and their children with gifts. We facilitate all
these projects by taking a few minutes out of our meeting time each week to
FOCUS on the FUTURE.

Here are some simple questions you can ask during
your focus time to help your group be more strategic in it's extra life-sharing
activities:

·What events or projects are coming up
in the next few weeks?

·Is there a cost? Who will collect the
money?

·Who will be participating?

·What do we need to bring for this?

·Who will be responsible for each
aspect of this event?

·Who will send out reminders?

If your group doesn't currently engage in missional or service projects,
let me encourage you to start as soon as possible!